A long, long time ago, the graphics designer at TASC got a new Macintosh computer, which meant that his old one was donated to the IT rooms.
When you’re used to various forms of dot-matrix output, Pagemaker on a Macintosh seems like a whole different world. All those fonts…
Actually, not that many. Century Gothic. Courier. New Century Schoolbook. Copperplate Gothic. Helvetica. Optima. Palatino. Tekton. And… Georgia.
Not that one particularly has a favourite font, but Georgia is a perfectly simple, clear font to use. I do try and stick to the design rules from those days; seriffed font for body text, sans seriffed for headers and similar. My CV, for example, uses Arial Black and Georgia.
I was musing on this for several reasons. Firstly, when typing a Word document, everything defaults to sans – Calibri these days, rather than Arial. My web site uses Bitter for headings and Open Sans for body text – the other way around to books and the way I was taught. It nearly used Source Sans Pro and PT Serif, a couple of Google fonts. In fact I could have changed to two of hundreds of Google fonts for the site, although my old template’s body text was… yes, Georgia.
But should my CV be wholly in Calibri / Arial / Open Sans or similar, like a normal Word document would be?
I don’t think so – but then you’d expect me to say that. I work in a communications discipline, so my CV contains three paragraphs of narrative that describe what I’ve done over the last three years. The recommendation is to use bullet points but that leaves the effort to the reader, not the writer. Not really good practice. Georgia is also a slightly larger font than Calibri; my body text size is 10pt and it’s at least as legible as something one point larger in other fonts, but somehow manages to take up less space.
Rest assured, however, it will not be in Comic Sans.